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26 February 2015

Children, Technology and Online Safety

We live in an age now whereby most people have some sort of computer, phone, tablet device and use them quite often. Heck, even my children have tablets that they play on and mess around on. But just how safe are children using technology?

I recently read an article on Tech Lounge about just this. The online voucher code website, My Voucher Codes​ have spoken to parents to find out their concerns over children using technology as part of their everyday lives, asking 'How would you rate the following parenting issues related to technology?'

And you want to know the results? Well, it's quite shocking really. 58% of people asking were extremely worried about online bullying and 48% were concerned about grooming. I was surprised that these figures weren't higher actually, being a parent means that I constantly worry about my children, not just now, but about what will happen in the future too. I worry about my children going online and having access to a world full of negativity and bad things.

Photo by patrisyu from freedigitalphotos.net

The effect of technology and social media on education was the main concern for the majority of parents along with addiction to social media and privacy.

As a parent, you want to make sure your children have boundaries, limiting access to these sites, setting time limits as to when children can go online and making sure that they don't lose themselves into the world of social media is all part of protecting children from anything bad happening.

When asked about how parents would stop any of these online issues from arising, most parents said that they would block access via router to stop their children accessing adult content as well as monitoring what their children are doing online and on social media to keep them protected.

I'm lucky at the moment that my children are still young and so only go on their tablets to play games and read. Also, their tablets have full privacy settings on them and have access to the internet blocked to make sure that they don't accidentally access anything inappropriate.

But of course, it wont always be this way. There will come a point where my children will go online and use social media and it does worry me. It worries me a lot about how easy certain things are to access online, but when it gets to this point, I will make sure I try my hardest to block any content that I feel is inappropriate and am already teaching them about using technology safely and setting limits on the amount of time they spend on computers and tablets.

3 comments:

Like you I worry about the future. My children are too young at the moment and don't have tablets or computers but I am scared about what they will access when they get older. Do you mind me asking. What tablet have you got for them as I didn't know they could block the internet

They have the Kurio. We were sent it to test out just before Christmas and it's ace! Even if you do allow them to go online, it has a safety feature whereby it blocks some websites from being accessible.